fedosyndicate
Hello world! A long time ago I used to play a game called EVE Online. There are silly little creatures called Fedo there. So when joining the Fediverse, I made a bit of a pun.
These guys are even more paranoid than many smaller instances about user names that appear to be randomly generated. Your own user name, as others in this thread suggested, would easily trigger their auto-ban rules. And a human moderator would take one look at the name and think the same thing.
God damnit, it took me until now to actually read their username. It’s the youtube URL for the rickroll video (ending in XcQ). I think you’re right though - it was obviously autogenerated originally and only took on its current meaning via Youtube’s use of the string.
I remember installing PC adblock just for Wowhead because even though they have great info (just about all the quests and dailies in WoW) they have so many ads and video popups. Haven’t really looked back since.
I haven’t gotten around to doing adblock for my phone, and so whenever I do visit those sites, I get really annoyed by everything.
It’s funny, many wikis moved off then-wikia to Curse’s Gamepedia family and then they just merged back again, kinda sad :(
To anyone that hasn’t seen the mythbusting thread it was pretty damn shocking: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yxqq9S14NxbCQBDfO0lq3xYL8IWrGLSeE47u7X1sUVo/pub
It is possible I set an unusually high bar for specificity, and when I read it back actually the following sentence “I think there’s outreach to be done in that regard as well.” does give appropriate grounds for interpretation. I’ll strike or retract the paragraph because with what I know now, I don’t think what I said was accurate any more.
Personally though, I do think that the clearest communication is done with a lower reliance on context. What may appear obvious to some may simply go over others heads. I don’t think that pre-existing knowledge is entirely irrelevant, but I don’t think it should be completely relied upon either.
One thought that’s already occurred is more dedicated efforts to grow communities that are useful to minority individuals or may attract them to use this site.
That sounds like a great idea, although not without its challenges (as an example, finding people both from those groups, and also willing to invest time into the community as leaders/mods). It would be very hard to found a community like that without finding someone who closely knows what that community needs and what would draw the group to a given social media platform; but if the process was done right their participation would certainly be a big draw for the site!